Ghostbusters: Past, Present and Future

For $4 million dollars, will the Ghostbusters capture the spirit(s) of Christmas?

IDW released this Rob Williams/Diego Jouran Pireira production for December of 2009. The company had acquired rights to the franchise the year before offering both one shots and a mini-series.

Ghostbusters has a long history in comic book form beginning with NOW Comics in 1988. The – no pun intended – now defunct company based its adaptation on the then current Real Ghostbusters syndicated cartoon. The two volume series has been collected in trade format by IDW.

Concurrently Marvel UK published a Ghostbusters series that ran 193 issues beginning in 1988. A reprint of the foreign series made its way into issue 21 of Real Ghostbusters due to NOW Comics production problems.

Further incarnations were also witnessed from Welsh Publishing Company and 88MPH Studios out of Canada. Tokyopop issued a one-shot manga comic book called Ghostbusters: Ghost Busted.

The film itself was a 1984 tour de force directed by Iven Reitman and co-written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis. In its initial theater run the movie grossed $242 million domestically and $295 worldwide.